Monday, February 29, 2016

The 30 Day Blog Binge: Day 1

We self-edit. We stop ourselves before we begin. We cross out words and ideas and in our heads before they hit the paper, screen or parchment (if we're old school like that). And in doing so, we lose the potential to connect, express, and create something. To create art.

In one of many library wanderings, I picked up Seth Godin's "The Icarus Deception." I was probably more attracted to the bright green cover than anything else, but I've read some of Godin's work before and it's always thought-provoking. This book is no different, even though I felt like the first 60 pages were a sort of orientation session to a choppy, stream-of-consciousness kind of musing on creating art in our industrial complex of a world.

At one point, though, Godin says "No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say, and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why, then," he asks, "is writer's block endemic?"

Godin goes on to say that we perceive talk as cheap, so we don't feel it will come back to haunt us. We're okay with talking poorly, so we don't get talker's block. But because we're not afraid to talk, we get better at it, in microscopic increments, over time.

But we're afraid to write, so we don't get unstuck or get better. We get blocked.

As someone who's been suffering through a bit of writer's block, a LOT of thinker's block, and maybe a touch of doubt at his current choice of profession and all its oversized challenges, this verged on prophetic. Godin says "Just write. Write poorly. Continue to write poorly in public, until you can do better."

With that in mind, I break ground on my "30 Day Blog Binge." 30 days of writing and posting each day, no matter how poorly, just to be writing. Knowing that I have to write again tomorrow forces me to see the world differently, to get out of my own head and look for something new, or look at something old in a new way. I'm sure some of these posts will be edtech, and I'm sure some of them won't. After all, I'm more than edtech: I'm human. And I think I do a disservice to the community of learners I'm a part of by denying the full range of humanity that exists in me.

So welcome to #30DBB. Feel free to follow along, or, even better, start your own binge. Is it scary? Yeah, a little. I have no idea what I'm writing about tomorrow. But on the other hand, as Godin says elsewhere "Real artists ship."